According to Google’s Abusive Experience Report the following ads are specifically designed to mislead users and are therefore noncompliant:

Auto-redirect the page without action from the user.

Take the user to a ad-landing page or other content when they click anywhere outside of the user-visible border of the element.

Resemble system or site warnings or error messages.

Simulate messages, dialog boxes or request notifications.

Depict features which do not work.

Display a “close” button that does anything other than closing the element when clicked.

Imitate antivirus alerts

According to Google, starting on Thursday, publishers that feature any of the aforementioned abusive ad experiences will receive a violation notification. The publisher will have 30 days to stop displaying the noncompliant ads and will have to submit their site for review via WebTools for approval from Google. For each listed experience, Google will provide a brief definition, the URL of the incriminated page, screenshots and a short video that shows the misleading elements.

Once the publisher has fixed all the issues from the report, he will have to submit his website for review. Even though Google has not publicly shared an exact time frame on how long the review process would take, some sources seem to indicate that the review could take around two weeks. If the publisher fails to comply, external links (using window.open links to open new tabs) will be blocked on the entire site, which lead to a loss of ad revenue, including from Google Adwords.

“We are excited to be adding new violations that Google considers as abusive to our detection arsenal. This new platform feature is a ‘must have’ for ad network platforms, publishers and ad operations teams,” AdSecure Product Manager Mathieu Derval explained. “Not only does it ensure that publisher revenues are not compromised by penalization from Google, but publishers continue to preserve trust and security within the online advertising ecosystem.”

“AdSecure clients have the capacity to run comprehensive scans to inspect their ad tags and will receive real-time notification alerts through AI assisted analysis,” said Derval, noting, “Each alert features a comprehensive report listing the noncompliant elements, allowing clients to take immediate action and reduce the risk of their own publisher clients getting flagged by Google.”